Wednesday, October 31, 2018

One of the greatest developments in gaming over the past couple of decades has been the quality of multiplayer options. There’s nothing like teaming up, making friends, and tackling the enemy together.

Sadly, however, multiplayer gaming is blighted by people who like to use these wonderful platforms to insult and abuse other players. If done sparingly and in the right context, this can be somewhat amusing for everyone but all too often people overstep the line, forcing developers to do what they can to stop the rot.

With some massive multiplayer games already under their belts, developer Rockstar is no stranger to these scenarios. With the release of Red Dead Redemption 2 recently, Rockstar is doing its bit to censor abuse and make us all shake our heads in disbelief.

As revealed by a user on Reddit, the company has implemented a banned words list, which attempts to deter people from using some of the worst sexual, racial, and religious insults, which is fair enough.

However, the developer has also seen fit to prevent players from talking about sites like The Pirate Bay, with the word ‘PirateBay’ banned from the game. Since the galaxy’s most resilient torrent site is hardly a friend of the gaming industry, the decision is not that much of a surprise. However, the developer goes much further with a whole range of bizarre censoring decisions that start of weirdly and get worse.

Taking them in alphabetical order, first up we have the term ‘BTJunkie’, which refers to a once-prominent torrent indexing site. What’s so special about this platform is that it’s been shut for well over six years. In fact, the site closed down for good in 2012 following the massive raid on Kim Dotcom. Safe to say, it’s not coming back.

Demonoid, on the other hand, has only been dead for a few weeks. The site, which has been up and down more times than a violinist’s elbow in recent years, disappeared into a mysterious cloud of smoke several weeks ago. We still don’t know what happened there, if anyone is still wondering.

Another curious addition to Rockstar’s banned list is ‘Fenopy’, a torrent site that shut itself down in 2014. Like many of the other sites on the Rockstar list, it was no stranger to censorship, having found its way onto ISP blocks around the world.

In October 2013, the legendary ‘isoHunt’ torrent index was closed down following a $110m settlement with the MPAA. For some reason, Rockstar thinks that RDR2 players shouldn’t discuss the platform, so the term is banned. It’s the same situation with Meganova, a site that also disappeared several years ago.

Becoming even more generic, Rockstar has also seen fit to ban the word ‘torrent’ and, for those who may not know the correct spelling, the word ‘torent’ too. ‘ZShare’ also makes an appearance, which is another head-scratcher for a site that was deleted from history way back in 2012.

The initialism ‘VCDQ’ has also made it onto Rockstar’s Great Firewall, which is nothing short of ridiculous. VCDQ – otherwise known as VCDQuality – was a site that reported on freshly-leaked pirate copies of movies and commented on the quality of the release. The site never offered copyrighted content and was a really useful platform. It too has been dead for a number of years.

Finally, the term ‘buttpirate’ is disqualified from RDR2 gaming utterances. Whether Rockstar simply got carried away with the pirate-themed bannings isn’t clear but from what we’ve seen so far, anything is possible.

The full list of banned words, ranging from distasteful to ridiculous, is available here.